Bubbles
Soaping Away
Nineteen year old Freedom blows bubbles infused with catnip and watches Evie bat and boop them out of the air.
The cat is transfixed with the laser focus of an apex predator and, in a similar but less carnivorous way, the bubbles help Freedom expand into the mindful present. Each careful blow forces her to breathe slowly; it demands deep breath; it interrupts the compulsion toward panicked hyperventilation. The shiny, vagrant spheres drifting on unseen breezes break her out of anxious rumination.
Around the same time, over the Hill and up the Peninsula, I am blowing the smoke from a spliff into bubbles of my own. Most of the smoke escapes around the flimsy wand, but enough goes through the ring to yield these itinerant crystal balls filled with swirling mist that mesmerize moderately-stoned me. The eddies of smoke linger briefly—little, bubble-sized puffs, quick to diffuse—as I pop the orbs lazily with a finger.
While Freedom finds comfort in the immediacy of amusing her cat, I explore my own fear through idle philosophical wanderings.
In three-dimensional space, the bubbles of consciousness we call “selves” are a hundred miles apart. Across the dimension of time, it will be half a decade before we bump into each other.
It will be another three years after that when I will stand facing her—in front of our friends and family but blind to their attention—my awareness narrowed to the diamond band I am sliding onto her finger.
Neither of us realizes, back in 2010, that we are destined to resonate with someone so harmoniously that questioning the solidity of our conscious selves’ boundaries will be as easy and natural as lying to your psychiatrist… but better for mental health.
Boiling Off Fear
When I was in fourth grade, a classmate asked me what I thought happens when we die. With a sort of terrified reverence, I asserted that the answer was, “Nothing.”
“Like what you see when you close your eyes?”
“No,” I pressed, ”a blackness so complete there isn’t even a ‘you’ to see the color black.” In the words of Watsky, I was an “emo fuckin’ nine-year-old,” but later, blowing bubbles while lounging on my curb-scavenged couch in my first house away from home, I toyed with an idea inspired by the Flatland Parable.
A sphere passing through a two dimensional plane would appear as a point that grows to a circle, continues growing to the sphere’s full circumference, then shrinks back to a single point, and finally disappears.
It occurred to me that human consciousness does the same thing through three dimensional space: babies are born with very little ability to communicate or critically analyze their mindset and setting; those abilities expand through childhood and adolescence but begin to decline in middle age until they vanish completely.
Anyone who has worked in a nursing home knows, if we’re lucky enough to survive to old age, we share the undignified destiny of total—almost infantile—dependence.
Of course, not everyone waxes and wanes fully—some people are hit by busses—but there’s no reason to imagine that droplets of consciousness are perfectly analogous to spheres. It’s easy to imagine a raindrop shape or an apple with a bite taken out of it.
As I watched my pot smoke swirl in bubbles that night ten years ago, I started thinking about reality as a boiling four-dimensional pot of water with a three-dimensional plane through it just below its rim.
Considering thermodynamics, I decided our consciousness is expressed in neural-pathway systems destroyed at the moment of brain death, but that the underlying energy—unable to be created or destroyed—is returned, like a collection of legos, back to the box for another day’s play.
The bubble breaches the water’s surface and its steam blends back into The Big Air.
On the way ”up” the pot, some bubbles unite with The Big Air early, only to rebound elastically and reform with a piece of that unified field still trapped inside. That’s where you get prophecy and creativity—any intuitive grasp of truth or beauty with an origin you can’t fully explain.
The same metaphor also explains the prevalence of common motifs in Near-Death Experiences.
According to many accounts, when your brain shuts off, you might meet relatives or celebrities, but you’ll experience them as aspects of yourself that are as familiar as your reflection in the mirror. And simultaneously, you are the you in the mirror, experiencing the return of yourself.
My fear was abruptly assuaged. I even felt excited. I experienced connection, like the boundaries of my bubble had briefly dissolved.
Poking holes in its membrane became my highest aim. Meditation and real-talk; a Platonic balance of appetites, emotions and intellect; self-care and habitual right action… each played its part in disintegrating the temporary walls that exist between my ephemeral self and the Conscious Universe.
Sharing Air
When Freedom and I began hanging out, we would spend hours parked in her car engaging in earnest mutual therapy.
A car is a sort of bubble too: it’s self-contained compartment let’s you believe you’re in traffic instead of a part of it. Enclosed together, we connected over our alienation from the world. Unpacking trauma, we filled the shared cabin with an atmosphere of compassion.
Taking turns raging.
Taking turns crying—or catching tearfulness from each other like a contagion.
This memory plays through my mind as I write because the smokey molecules of consciousness—thoughts—continue to swirl through the present, stimulated by the flighty winds of three dimensional reality.
Talking in her car, I absorbed pieces of her memories as they were churned up to the surface. Sometimes I have to be reminded that I wasn’t actually there for a story when it dances through our married present. With bubble borders porous in my pure, almost meditative state, my meandering path through material reality brought me close enough to absorb some smoke from her.
Demonstrating continuity with her cat-loving nineteen-year-old self, Freedom continues to be a caretaker who is better at bubble-merging than I am. She’s somehow pressurized to pull in vapor from everyone she bumps into.
I earned more than one promotion while we were coworkers by relying on her explanations of the irritability of my bosses—moods I would have otherwise spent hours agonizing over in a sort of pessimistic narcissism.
The level of comfort and security I’ve achieved directly depended on her quasi-psychic gift.
There are so many profound moments people take for granted in relationships. When I finish her sentences; when she hears me make a joke before I’ve actually said it; when we take in one another’s crumpled posture and correctly guess at the presence of anxiety… what is that except smoke transferring from one bubble to the other?
It feels good—it feels right—to marry my bubble with hers, like a pair of ketchup bottles at closing time.
In cuddly moments of marital bliss, it sometimes seems like it’s more than her I’m merged with: I am briefly a piece of The Big Air itself.
Geoff Gallinger writes poems, essays and fiction and has said a time or two that a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing from SF State qualifies them perfectly for being a pizza driver. That sounds like self-deprecation, but hours a day completely alone in a beater car with an audiobook and a notepad for company are actually a good approximation of a “room of one’s own.”
Being home isn’t too bad either; their daughter and wife will always be their primary audience.
[…] is more than one me in me. Every situation I’m in prompts a different me to emerge. Every person I’ve met exists inside me, a puzzle piece collaborating to complete my […]
[…] But! I had just finished the second essay of my adult life, itself a sort of emo love song. Although it articulated my own invented metaphysical beliefs, it was primarily an olive branch extended toward my wife after a challenging week. I readily accepted the bubbles that mysteriously floated down my street—a pair of them—as a sign from the universe because that essay was an ode to my wife’s love of bubbles. […]